Computing technology has revolutionized the way that we work, play, and communicate. Computing technology has been integrated into a wide variety of devices; sometimes such systems are networked together to form an intricate fabric of processing centers. It is not unusual for even a small organization to have a number of computing systems interconnected to accomplish the overall computing needs of the organization. For instance, firewalls, Domain Name Servers (also referred to as “DNS” servers), e-mail servers, web servers, domain controllers, database servers, and so forth, may each provide valuable services for an organization.
Complex networks may be quite complicated to manage. For instance, each computing system may operate a number of services or daemons. Each of these services may depend on the other services within the computing system, or perhaps depend on services operating on even other computing systems. It is often difficult for even the most experienced of Information Technology (IT) professionals to have a perfect concept of the interdependencies of the variety of services. This can be especially true for large corporate networks in which there can be literally hundreds of interoperating servers.